Whether it’s our children or ourselves, it’s very important to make sure that there’s a strong balance between enjoying oneself and working hard in a sport while also ensuring one’s body is capable of what’s being demanded. Like nutrition, this is one of those challenging topics in recent years. The reason is that there is mainly a lack of good information that is being disseminated to people. We won’t get into the what we believe is a debacle of unprecedented proportions, when it comes to food advice, quality, and eating habits. We’ll have to tackle that topic in a whole series of other posts.

Back to sports and one’s ability to perform the activity well. There is, again, a lack of good knowledge that is being made available to both young athletes, as well as adults and older participants of sports or just activities. We say this because the focus has changed through the past few decades. It used to be that cardiovascular aspects of fitness and burning calories was the most important thing. Indeed, if you walk into most gyms or ask people their impression of what is a “good” thing to do, they will answer with some type of cardio activity. Of course, you can burn calories doing this, but you’re also potentially performing massively repetitive strain-inducing motions that your body can’t appropriately handle.

Then, we come to goals. Some people simply won’t care because we also have a popular culture today of the “extreme” sports players or otherwise folks that are up for a challenge. So, we are equating with (essentially) abusing our body with repetitive motions in the name of achievement. Then, a central point of ours here is that people are not even equipped well to do this. We say this in terms of having the core strength to perform the tasks. In fact, that’s another confusing term we used there, that means different things to different people. When we say core, there’s sure a large audience that will think we’re talking about abdominal muscles, especially pretty ones and the almighty “six-pack” that everyone is fixated on like a zombie.

In fact, we mean something completely different. We mean functional strength at the core of the body, which is the area around the hips. Especially the posterior area is where there’s a massive source of power. Just like at sprinters or others that perform explosive work of that nature and you will see it clearly illustrated. This functional core strength is critical for everyone wishing to stay healthy for the long term and to have good performance in the activities that they engage. Whether that activity is football, running, or table tennis, how the body needs to work is identical.

Speaking of table tennis, we ran across an excellent site lately that has good reviews of different tables for purchase. Stiga is an excellent brand, but those that appreciate the sport should also check out Joola’s best ping pong table, as well before making a final decision.